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Neomylodon
an Patagonia |Reported=1898 |Researchers=• Florentino Ameghino • Hesketh Prichard • Bernard Heuvelmans • Charlie Jacoby • Austin Whittall }} The Patagonian ground sloth (Neomylodon listai or Grypotherium domesticum) was a cryptid ground sloth proposed to exist in the interior of the Patagonian plains by Florentino Ameghino, based on a number of alleged sightings and on the discovery of a piece of skin. Ameghino, Florentino "An Existing Ground-Sloth in Patagonia," Natural Science 13 (1898) Ameghino confused the issue by connecting the animal with stories of the aquatic, otter-like predator iemisch, but later writers noted that other Patagonian monsters such as the succarath, lobo-toro, and ellëngassën do sound like ground sloths. The story caused quite a stir amongst turn-of-the-century naturalists, and a British expedition was sent to Patagonia to search for more evidence. Sightings Undated Francisco Moreno received reports of a terrifying but rare hairy beast from the Tehuelche and Gennake Indians. The explorer Ramón Lista reported the Tehuelche belief that the Sierra Carhuerne, Santa Cruz, was home to "evil spirits and monstrous quadrupeds" which once carried off a whole family of Indians, although Bernard Heuvelmans wrote that, as none of the family survived to tell their tail, their disappearance was simply attributed to the mysterious quadrupeds. Santiago Roth was told by a Tehuelche chief named Kankel that a very savage beast used to live near Lake Buenos Aires in Santa Cruz: when it roared, all the other animals fled, and one day it supposedly killed a herd of horses belonging to Kankel's grandfather. Ameghino claimed that he had heard many stories of a: Although bulletproof skin has often been hailed as good evidence of a ground sloth identity for this and other cryptids, Roy P. Mackal noted that immunity to bullets is a common feature of South American folkloric beings. Even more dramatically, Englishman Arthur Button, who settled in Puerto Natales in 1905, heard stories of "Indians working harvesting corn with animals as large as mylodons and almost buried in the corn," stories which Austin Whittall connects to a putative Patagonian tapir instead of Mylodon.Whittall, Austin Patagonian tapir. Part 2. Proof | Patagonian Monsters patagoniamonsters.blogspot.com 2 July 2019 circa late 1880's Ameghino wrote that Ramón Lista, an explorer and governor of Santa Cruz, told himself, his brother Carlos Ameghino, and several other people of a sighting he'd had of a hairy pangolin-like creature, which he saw whilst riding in the interior of Santa Cruz: On account of its size, Heuvelmans suggested that the animal seen by Lista was probably a very young individual. Although Ameghino claimed that Lista had also mentioned the incident in one of his books, Arthur Smith Woodward could not find a record of the encounter in any of the Library of the Royal Geographical Society's collection of books written by Lista, who had been murdered by the time of the skin's discovery.Prichard, Hesketh Vernon (1902) Through the Heart of Patagonia However, Lista wrote forty-one books and papers in total, and even Jorge Carman's modern collection of his works, Obras: 1887-1897, does not contain all of his writings. 1898 Edward Chace, an American who lived in Patagonia in the early 20th Century, claimed that: According to George Eberhart, who lists the encounter as an ellëngassën sighting, the first incident, in which the animal was actually seen, occurred in 1898. Physical evidence Skin A German sheep rancher named Hermann Eberhard discovered the Cueva del Milodon in January 1895. Inside he found a large piece of hide, 1.5m long and about 70 to 80cm wide, which looked fresh but which he knew belonged to no known animal.Hauthal, R. (1899) Reseña de los Hallazgos en las Cavernas de Última Esperanza Eberhardt kept the skin hanging for a year, until he showed it to a visiting scientist, Nils Otto Gustaf Nordenskjöld, who found more pieces of skin and bones in the cave. His specimens were sent back to Sweden, where they were identified as Mylodon. Other souvenir hunters, including a party of Chilean navy officers, also took pieces of the skin, and eventually Francisco Moreno, curator of the La Plata Natural Sciences Museum, took the whole specimen back to his museum. At this point, someone (Heuvelmans suggests it was one of the Chilean naval officers) brought a number of ossicles from the skin to Argentina palaeontologist Florentino Ameghino. Ameghino promptly wrote a "pamphlet" on the Mylodon in which he expressed belief that the animal was still alive, based on the condition of the bones and on a number of sightings he had collected, including the one allegedly made by Lista - he believed the animal seen by Lista was the same as the animal from which the skin came because of its apparent immunity to bullets, suggesting it was armoured under its fur. In honour of Lista's sighting, and because Lista himself had been murdered, shot dead at Miraflores by his two Tobas Indian guidesIt was also variably rumoured that he had committed suicide, or been murdered by his secretary. whilst exploring the Pilcomayo fairly recently, Ameghino named the animal represented by the skin Neomylodon listai. Moreno, however, insisted that the skin was very old, preserved only by climatic conditions in the Cueva del Milodon, a belief partially fuelled by his discovery of a well-preserved human mummy, of a race no longer found in the region, within a similar cave. He arranged for the skin to be examined by eminent palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward, and presented his point of view in a paper read before the Zoological Society of London on 21 February 1899. The meeting totally disagreed with him (although one palaeontologist, Ray Lankester, suggested that the hide came from an unknown armadillo instead of a sloth), and for a time it was believed that the remains were indeed fresh. In his description of the hide, Woodward said that he "should unhesitatingly express the opinion that it belonged to an animal killed shortly before Dr. Moreno recognised its interest, had he not been able to give so circumstantial an account of its discovery and strengthened his point of view by recording the occurrence of a human mummy of an extinct race in another cavern in the same district". He noted the presence of a covering of dried serum on part of the skin, which he said was "suggestive of grave doubts as to the antiquity of the specimen," although Vaughan Harley told him that similar dried serum had been discovered on ancient Egyptian mummies. He was more sceptial regarding the animal itself, saying that "it is indeed strange that so large and remarkable a quadruped should have hitherto escaped detection in a country which has been so frequently visited by scientific explorers," and he thought the skin was not connected to Lista's "hairy pangolin" because of the latter animal's smaller size.Moreno, F. P. & Woodward, A. S. (1899) "On a portion of mammalian skin, named Neomylodon listai, from a cavern near Consuelo Cove, Last Hope Inlet, Patagonia," Proceedings from the Zoological Society of London Shortly after the paper was read, Woodward was able to read Otto Nordenskjöld's paper describing the specimens he had taken, which included a claw sheath. Zoologist Einar Lönnberg boiled a piece of Nordenskjöld's skin and extracted glue from it, "which proves that the collagen and gelatinous substances are perfectly preserved". Woodward felt that this indicated that "if the specimen is of any considerable age, it must have been very well protected against moisture and bacteria". drawn by Austin Whittall. Ameghino's connection of the Mylodon with this cryptid caused much confusion.]] Ameghino now wrote a note connecting the skin with an animal called the iemisch, an aquatic monster which killed horses. His brother Carlos had, in 1897, sent him some little bones which he claimed the Indians had said came from an iemisch, but Ameghino's subsequent description of the iemisch, based on Indian reports, bore no resemblance to a ground sloth, and Ameghino altered the number of toes on the creature to better fit Megatherium. Heuvelmans wrote that "Ameghino seems to have gone completely astray in accepting this theory of his brother's that the armoured skin came from the Patagonians' iemisch". More plausibly, Santiago Roth thought that an extinct jaguar, the bones of which he discovered in the Cueva del Milodon, might be the iemisch, leading him to christen the fossil Iemisch listai - in honour of Lista's alleged sighting of the "pangolin". Meanwhile, another scientist named Erland Nordenskjöld had visisted the cave and pronounced that the skin belonged to a different type of sloth, Glossotherium. Geologist Rudolf Hauthal also explored the cave, and declared that the sloths, which were declared to be a new genus named Grypotherium domesticum, had been kept in there by the Indians in a semi-domesticated state. Further testing suggested that the skins found in the cave were around 10,000 years old, and preserved by climatic conditions. Neomylodon and Grypotherium are now considered synonymous with either Mylodon or Glossotherium. Expeditions 1900 Based on Ameghino's research, English palaeontologist Ray Lankester mentioned during a lecture that Mylodon may still survive in South America. His statement attracted the attention of newspaper magnate Sir Arthur Pearson, founder of the Daily Express, who despatched the explorer and adventurer Hesketh Vernon Prichard, who had already travelled to Haiti for him, to investigate the matter in Patagonia in 1899. Shortly before leaving England with his second-in-command, J. B. Scrivenor, and three other Europeans, he was joined by an unnamed traveller who "showed good evidence that he knew of very recent tracks" of the Mylodon. One newspaper, The Sphere, was optimistic about his chances, writing "whether the party will capture him ''sloth in the act of tearing up a tree in the manner of his ancestors or will first sight one being milked by a Tehuelche Indian, only the return of the expedition can say''"."Does the Gigantic Mylodon Still Live in South America?," The Sphere (20 October 1900) Prichard's expedition found no evidence, though Heuvelmans criticises him for turning back in a huff before he even reached Last Hope Inlet, disappointed in his own failure. He did not believe a large animal could live in Patagonia's dense Valdivian forests, which he did not explore, but he admitted that "in addition to the regions visited by our Expedition, there are, as I have said, hundreds and hundreds of square miles about, and on both sides of the Andes, still unpenetrated by man. A large portion of this country is forested, and it would be presumptuous to say that in some hidden valley far beyond the present ken of man some prehistoric animal may not still exist. Patagonia is, however, not only vast, but so full of natural difficulties". Undated Heuvelmans mentions that another expedition, led by "Cavendish and Koslowsky," was sent out to search for the Mylodon, but was no more more succesful that Prichard's expedition. 2001 In 2001, Charlie Jacoby, the grandson of Hesketh Prichard, led an expedition to Patagonia to search for evidence of a live ground sloth on the hundred-year anniversary of Prichard's expedition. Jacoby's expedition retraced the route of the first one. Similar cryptids Other ground sloth-like cryptids reported from Patagonia include the ellëngassën, the lobo-toro, and the succarath. Although Ameghino thought the iemisch could be a ground sloth, this theory is discounted by cryptozoologists, and served only to confuse the issue of the Patagonian ground sloth. In popular culture Do you think the exists? If so, what do you think the is? Myth, folklore, hoax, or otherwise made-up (inc. folk memory) Mistaken identity Giant ground sloth Water tiger (e.g. iemisch, giant otter, etc.) *A novel featuring the Patagonian ground sloth, In Quest of the Giant Sloth (1902) was written by Gordon Stables very soon after the Prichard expedition and the scientific furore over the Cueva del Milodon skin. The novel also includes a monster very similar to the Patagonian plesiosaur, which was not known at the time. *The "blonde beast of Patagonia" was one of the cryptids mentioned by Charles Fort in Lo! (1931). *Charles Amherst Milward took some hide from the Cueva del Milodon and sent it to his cousin, the grandmother of writer Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin's supposed desire to reach the cave in search of either a living animal or a piece of its skin for himself forms the basis of his popular travelogue In Patagonia (1977). In his examination of sightings near the end of the book, Chatwin concludes that the Mylodon is extinct, and that the yaquaru was "probably a caiman". *The plot of the comedy adventure film The Darien Gap (1996) concerns "a twenty-something slacker" who intends to film the Patagonian giant sloth. As he cannot afford transport, he attempts to hitchhike to Patagonia, but runs into trouble in the eponymous gap of swamp and forest in the Pan-American Highway. *A stuffed "Patagonian giant sloth" plays a major role in the novel Tramps, Beggars and Sloths (2016). Further cryptozoological reading *Heuvelmans, Bernard (1955) On the Track of Unknown Animals, Routledge, ISBN 978-1138977525 *Historical resources Notes and references Category:Cryptids Category:South America Category:Argentina Category:Chile Category:Theory: Living fossil - Ground sloth Category:Historical - Modern Category:No recent sightings Category:Featured